Question on ISO-639:1988

[Debbie Garside]

Hi Peter

>>Thus, for purposes of RFC 3066, Chinese in simplified characters and
Chinese in traditional characters are two different things; and English with
US spelling and English with UK spelling are two different things. For XML
content, such distinctions are important.

The proposed ISO 639-6 deals with language variations in the same way as RFC
3066 albeit by using unique alpha4 code.

>>But ISO 639 does not make such distinctions.

But it is in the pipeline... please read the papers as presented in Lisbon.

Debbie

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no
[mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no]On Behalf Of Peter
Constable
Sent: 26 May 2004 00:01
To: ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
Subject: RE: Question on ISO-639:1988


>> If ISO639 isn't a good way to tag content language, then why is it there
at
>> all?  What else does it tag?

> ISO 639 is good at identifying languages, but there are many cases in
which it is not
> sufficient enough to identify content narrowly.

At issue here are two different senses of the term “language”: ISO 639 uses
language in a narrow sense, meaning a linguistic variety. Possibly spoken,
possibly written, but all that is distinguished is the linguistic variety.

RFC 3066 uses “language” in a derivative sense that encompasses both
dialectal variations and also representations of linguistic information, in
particular, written forms. Thus, for purposes of RFC 3066, Chinese in
simplified characters and Chinese in traditional characters are two
different things; and English with US spelling and English with UK spelling
are two different things. For XML content, such distinctions are important.
But ISO 639 does not make such distinctions.

Is ISO 639 of any use? Absolutely. It is a building block on which RFC 3066
is built, and there are other usage contexts in which differences related to
dialect or written form are not relevant.


Peter

Peter Constable
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Microsoft Windows Division


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